Kodagu objectors say party office supplied pre-filled voter deletion forms
At least 50 Form-7 applications seeking deletion of Muslim voters’ names were filed at one Kodagu polling station, according to data accessed by The Hindu. The objectors said they received the forms from a party office and followed instructions, while local officials said they had not received the applications.
At least 50 applications seeking the deletion of Muslim voters’ names were filed at a single polling station in Kodagu district on September 23, according to data accessed by The Hindu. The applications were submitted at the Government Higher Primary School polling station in Bydagotta. The forms were pre-filled with voters’ names and electoral photo identity card numbers, while only the objectors’ names were handwritten.
The objectors said the applications had been sent from the “party office”. All the forms cited “absent” as the reason for seeking deletion. The applications were filed by objectors named Rajni, B.N.
Basavaraju, Lokesh, Savitha Malali and A.C. Nagaraj. Officials in Somwarpet, where the polling station is located, said they had not received any of the applications.
When contacted by The Hindu, Basavaraju and Rajni said they had each filed 10 forms because they suspected the voters had duplicate entries. Asked why the applications cited absence rather than duplicate entries, the objectors said they did not know the details and had followed instructions from the party office in Somwarpet. They declined to identify the party.
They said five people had been given 10 forms each. Basavaraju said they had doubts that the people named in the forms had duplicate votes and that they told booth-level officers they wanted to fill Form-7 applications offline. However, the forms had already been printed with the voters’ names and EPIC numbers, a pattern also seen in applications from other constituencies.
The report places the Kodagu applications within a wider trend across Karnataka, where pre-filled Form-7 applications were filed in bulk seeking the deletion of Muslim voters’ names. Between June 16 and September 24, a total of 61,130 Form-7 applications were filed across the State, according to the data cited by The Hindu. The supplied material does not state whether the Kodagu applications were accepted or whether any voter names were removed.
This independently written report is based on information supplied by the named publisher. Vertrix News has not independently verified the source report.